Nine years, and some nineteen releases on, the Ubuntu desktop we find ourselves sat in front of today bears little resemblance to that of its younger self. The distro went, virtually overnight, from a Debian-based curiosity – “A space tourist making a Linux distro?!” – to becoming one of the most recognisable and powerful forces in open-source software.

We had hoped to share some words from the man himself on the genesis of Ubuntu, and whether he ever expected it to grow as large and as popular as it has. But, understandably, given the bi-annual post-release comedown, we haven’t heard back from him. Hopefully he’s somewhere with a nice slice of cake!

Nevertheless, to help celebrate the milestone we’ve put together a concise visual overview of Ubuntu’s release history, highlighting some of the key features and changes each update has brought with it.